How to Build a Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2024 in 11 Steps (+ Free Template)

Social media has changed the way businesses market themselves. Previously, brands limited their audience to local customers—but with social media, it has expanded multifold.

Now, they can invest in marketing campaigns for a fraction of the cost while reaching ideal customers without actually going to them.

Even though the benefit is clear, many small business owners get overwhelmed with the sheer number of channels they must keep up with. 

Every year, new platforms pop up, catering to a different need or audience. For instance, Mastodon and Instagram Threads grew in popularity in 2023, immediately after Twitter’s recent takeover.

So how do you craft a social media marketing strategy that serves your intended audience, irrespective of the channel?

This guide will show you how to do that quickly with a free plug-and-play template.

Step 1: Define your “why” and align it with your business goals

Social media marketing serves many purposes. You might want to increase brand awareness, generate leads or create another channel for direct sales. No matter what it is, unless you clearly define why you want to do it—it’s hard to create a strategy that supports that goal.

For instance, Plainly uses an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn as it creates stronger emotional resonance with its audience.

“In our experience, having real people post about recent product releases or trending topics brings the best results,” says Nebojsa Savicic, co-founder of Plainly. 

“Personally, I feel that the strength of a personal brand translates to the company brand as well. People like to connect with people versus company pages, which is why we encourage our team members to post regularly. LinkedIn is our main channel in that sense.”

Similarly, you might have specific goals too. For example, increasing online sales by 20% next quarter. 

Step 2: Research your target audience and define the social channels

The biggest mistake brands make is they choose a social media channel, hoping to make it “big” there. But that only means you've got it backward. Instead, research your target audience and use those insights to pick your channels. 

Scour the top platforms and manually search and validate the presence of your target audience. Or ask them.

“We survey our customers annually, do focus groups bi-annually, and have regular unstructured conversations with them,” says Colin Jeffries, vice president of marketing and communications at BrightView Health. “These insights guided us to sunset Twitter and engage more on Youtube.”

It’s important to note that the average person shifts their attention between seven social networks per month. But that doesn't mean they use each channel for the same reason. While some might use Facebook only to keep up with family and friends, others might research products and participate in communities. So talking to your customers is one way to avoid this issue.

Also, different platforms cater to different audiences. Snapchat is great for targeting a younger audience or individuals who like visual channels better. But LinkedIn is great for targeting B2B audiences. 

So think of these aspects and rely on your demographics/buyer persona documents to pinpoint the channels worth the investment.

Just make sure the platform serves the seven C’s of social media while aligning with your business goals:

• Content

• Community

• Conversation

• Capital (social)

• Culture

• Collaboration and co-creation

• Conversion

Step 3: Identify your direct and attention competitors

Conduct a competitive analysis on 10 to 20 competitors. 

Let's say you're selling handcrafted journals to productivity geeks through your ecommerce store. Other planner products are your direct competitors. But those who post productivity-related content are your competitors, too—known as attention competitors. You'll find a significant audience overlap with them, and you're both competing for your audience's attention.

“If you're starting out fresh, you're going to want to do a ‘lay of the land’ type assessment,” Nick Gaudio, director of content & creative at Rattle. 

“What are your competitors doing? What's working for them? Ideally, you want to treat this exercise as an opportunity to bring fresh content and ideas so you can stick out. I highly recommend developing a brand bible of sorts, including the stories your brand has "access to" so you can maintain consistency and inevitably build the trust you need to begin establishing a community.”

Conduct a SWOT analysis and research their social profiles. Dissect their content, engagement tactics, posting frequency, and tone of voice. Pay attention to what's resonating but also what's not. This will show you opportunities to differentiate yourself.

And don't just look at surface-level insights. Get into the weeds and look at their engagement, community, and paid advertising strategy to get the complete picture.

Hootsuite

Step 4: Set up specific social media KPIs for each channel

The type of KPIs you choose for each channel will depend on the end goal. 

For example, if you aim to increase website visitors, you'll monitor how many people visit the website after clicking on your social post. Or, if your goal is to increase engagement, monitor the engagement rate for each post and compare it with historical data.

As long as it’s a SMART goal (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound), it’ll be easy to decide which social media metrics to track. 

Here’s a list of metrics most social media platforms use:

• Impressions: How many people viewed your post?

• Likes: How many people liked your post?

• Comments: How many people commented on your post?

• Engagement rate: How many people engaged with your post compared to those who viewed it?

• Views: How many people viewed your video content?

• Follower count: How many people have followed your account in the past X days?

• Clicks: How many people clicked on your social media campaign/links?

• Conversion rate: How many people took the desired action?

Step 5: Do a complete social media audit

If you don’t have existing social accounts, skip to Step 6 instead.

If you already have a social media account, conduct an audit based on industry and social platforms' best practices. Here are a few questions you can answer:

• Is your profile complete with the right keywords?

• Is your branding consistent and visually appealing?

• Is the content relevant to your target audience?

• Is your company’s value proposition clear?

• Which content is the most engaged with?

• Which content is bringing in the most conversions?

• Are you on the right channels based on customer survey feedback?

• How do you compare to your competitors?

Benchmark your performance against these indicators and find areas for improvement.

Step 6: Create a realistic social media budget

Now that you know what needs to be done, create a budget plan with line items. Here are a few things you can plan for:

• In-house/freelance social media strategists

• In-house/freelance social media managers

• In-house/freelance designers or illustrators

• In-house/freelance user-generated content (UGC) creator

• Designing tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Canva, etc.

• Social media management and scheduling tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.

• Social media analytics tools like Birdy, Publer, etc.

• Potential influencer partnerships 

• Total paid advertising spend

Also, it's not always about keeping it as low as possible but allocating enough to get the desired returns. For instance, if you're hiring freelancers, some might quote $300 for monthly management, but some might quote $2500. Think about the value you're getting out of it.

“The clearer the scope of the project, the better. If you plan to engage in an ongoing capacity, giving multiple projects up front can be extremely helpful in letting the freelancers work ahead,” says Jeffries. 

“The other element has been recognizing their specific expertise. We wanted a freelancer to help clean up our Facebook business listings, and narrowing that expertise down was helpful in ensuring a good fit versus something broad and generic like ‘help with social media’.”

Step 7: Think about what to share on social media

The content ideas you share acts as the foundation for your brand's perception. So understand the platform's formats and leverage each of them to maximize your reach. For instance, TikTok allows only video formats. Create a content strategy that leverages this format.

Custom Neon uses Instagram as its main channel, and they use all the features the platform offers. Some include single images, multi-image carousels, Reels, Stories, etc. And by highlighting their product and customer feedback strategically, they've generated more than $10,000 in sales every week.

“We literally had no other outreach strategy at first other than word of mouth. So creating a social media presence through an Instagram account was game-changing,” says Jake Munday, CEO and co-founder of Customer Neon. 

“Our products are visually striking, get used at milestone events, so they are often styled stunningly. Which really helps in driving aspiration and desire. We used a combination of user-generated content (UGC) and original social media posts to not only increase brand awareness but also create a community and advocacy around our brand.”

Instagram

Strategists use two popular models to guide their social strategy: the 80-20 and 70-20-10 models.

In the former, 80% of the content should educate or entertain, and 20% of the content should promote the brand offerings. However, in the latter, 70% of the content should inform, 20% should evoke emotions, and 10% of the content should promote brand offerings. So decide the ideal strategy based on your current social media marketing goals.

Step 8: Create your accounts and optimize them

Irrespective of whether you’re setting up a new account or improving an existing one, here are a few key things you need to account for:

• Fill out all the mandatory profile fields

• Use industry-specific keywords in your profile

• Use high-quality media for banners, logos, and posts

• Take advantage of platform-native features

• Include website or ecommerce store links

These steps will increase your account's visibility and tell visitors what you do. So carefully craft an accurate and compelling business description with a solid call to action (CTA).

Let’s look at Matchable’s LinkedIn page. LinkedIn was its social media network of choice because founders, human resources (HR), and people operations professionals browsed it the most. 

Matchable Volunteering's LinkedIn page

They optimized their profile for “CSR platform matching” and “corporate volunteering” to show up in search. The team also included high-quality and on-brand graphics while using the “Products” feature to highlight their matching product.

Matchable Volunteering's LinkedIn About

Step 9: Set up a social media content calendar

The content calendar sets your strategy in motion. The idea is to decide what and when you'll post strategically. Here's what a typical calendar includes:

• Title of the post

• Social post brief

• Social post copy

• Character count

• Hashtags

• Time to post

• Social channel

• Content format

You can use industry benchmarks and social media analytics tools to determine the best posting time for your account. 

Also, find the right content mix. It’s best to switch it up based on the kind of campaigns you’re running. For example, 75% of your content can be tactical how-tos, 15% for redirecting visitors to your website/lead magnets, and 10% for employee advocacy content.

Step 10: Create engaging and impactful content

Build each social asset and start posting it on your chosen channels. Your success hinges on how well you create and curate content—the content creation strategy.

Rattle, a RevOps platform, increased its followers from 1,000 to 10,000 in 7 months without any ad spend by creating helpful and high-quality content. This has built credibility and generated quality leads for their business—so much so they're no longer a “small business.”

“Do not treat social media as yet another promotional channel, where you continually ask people to buy stuff all the time,” says Gaudio. 

“You want to give at least four times more than you ask. The idea is to stay top-of-mind when your buyers are looking for a solution that your product solves and if you press on them too long and too often, they'll put up their marketing defense systems and then you're all but out of luck.”

Here are a few tips to keep in mind before creating these assets:

• Create on-brand creative assets that align with your social content strategy.

• Have a healthy mix of educational, entertaining, and promotional content.

• Align the content with the type of network you’re on.

• Use clear and contextual CTAs to guide users on each post.

• Continuously test what works and what doesn’t.

Step 11: Monitor performance on each channel

Keep an eye on your KPIs every week and create monthly reports to assess what's working. But don't obsess over the reach of one-off posts. With organic social, it takes time to show results; the post is just one piece of the puzzle. 

Your engagement and community-building strategy make a massive difference—spend time on these aspects too.

“We measured the success and returns from our social media marketing efforts by ensuring we had a clear plan for tracking KPIs such as traffic, engagement, lead numbers, and conversion for anything through the social channels,” says Oliver Farmiloe, marketing executive at Matchable. 

“It's important to establish the average value of a lead, or email, or engagement to you on social media, even if it's just an estimate initially, so that you can somewhat accurately track return on your investment and time.”

Modify your strategy as social media trends take over each platform, your business goals change, or buyer persona/messaging documents are refreshed. And use paid social media analytics tools to get ready-made reports.

Download your free social media marketing strategy template.

Hire an experienced social media strategist with Fiverr

Even though social media has become an indispensable part of every company’s marketing strategy, there’s a lot of ground to cover while creating this strategy. This is why it’s best to outsource this part of the process to experienced marketers.

Freelance social media strategists have experience working with businesses like yours and driving meaningful results for them. 

Plus, they’re always up-to-date on the latest trends—bringing flexibility to the process. They understand the intricacies of such platforms and have the knowledge to develop a tailored brand strategy that improves your online process.

So, why not hire your social media partner from Fiverr today?